Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Gun owners beware.

Have you noticed the number of gun shops have been decreasing. This may be why:

The government is using paperwork errors as small as the abbreviation of a city name to shut down some of the nation's longest-serving gun shops, and 2nd Amendment advocates fear the right to bear arms will mean little if there's no way to obtain a gun. ...Ryan Horsley, a spokesman for Red's, which has been in business 71 years, said the store has been battling over its license because of rules infractions such as a missing poster for more than six years.

..."Imagine having your driver's license revoked because you did not completely spell out the word 'no' when answering a 'yes' or 'no' question on your application five years ago," his petition asks. He told WND the inspectors begin with efforts to locate any petty violation they can, usually clerical mistakes. "They list these errors as 'willful' which Congress set in the wording to protect FFL dealers," he said. "The dealer's Federal Firearms License is then revoked and the dealer must enter an appeals process which is extremely unfair."

He said essentially the appeal of a ATF decision goes directly to the people who originally made the decision. ...And he noted a family gun business that had been operation in Baltimore, Md., for years was attacked because of the "wanton, repeated crime" of abbreviating Baltimore as "Blto" on the "teeny, tiny spaces on the forms provided by the teeny, tiny little minds."